XML::RSS is an extremely handy tool, but it is unfortunately not exactly the most lean or efficient RSS parser, especially in a long-running process. So for a long time I had been using my own version of RSS parser to get the maximum speed and efficiency - this is the re-packaged version of that module, such that it adheres to the XML::RSS interface.

Use this module when you have severe performance requirements working with RSS files.

The original XML::RSS has been evolving in fairly rapid manner lately, and that meant that there were a lot of features to keep up with. To keep compatibility, I've had to pretty much rewrite the module from ground up.

Now XML::RSS::LibXML is *almost* compatible with XML::RSS. If there are problems, please send in bug reports (or more preferrably, patches ;)

There seems to be a bit of confusion as to how compatible XML::RSS::LibXML is with XML::RSS: XML::RSS::LibXML is NOT 100% compatible with XML::RSS. For instance XML::RS::LibXML does not do a complete parsing of the XML document because of the way we deal with XPath and libxml's DOM (see CAVEATS below)

On top of that, I originally wrote XML::RSS::LibXML as sort of a fast replacement for XML::RAI, which looked cool in terms of abstracting the various modules. And therefore versions prior to 0.02 worked more like XML::RAI rather than XML::RSS. That was a mistake in hind sight, so it has been addressed (Since XML::RSS::LibXML version 0.08, it even supports writing RSS :)

From now on XML::RSS::LibXML will try to match XML::RSS's functionality as much as possible in terms of parsing RSS feeds. Please send in patches and any tests that may be useful!

Once parsed the resulting data structure resembles that of XML::RSS. However, as one addition/improvement, XML::RSS::LibXML uses a technique to allow users to access complex data structures that XML::RSS doesn't support as of this writing.